Ben Golder

Lucas Lixinski

Marina Nehme

Prue Vines

Mark Duffy

Helen Gibbon

In an age when everyone aspires to teach critical thinking skills in the classroom, what does it mean to be a subversive law teacher? Who or what might a subversive law teacher seek to subvert – the authority of the law, the university, their own authority as teachers, perhaps? Are law students ripe for subversion, agents of, or impediments to, subversion? Do they learn to ask critical questions? Responding to the provocation in the classic book Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Postman and Weingartner, the idea that teaching could, or even should, be subversive still holds true today, and its premise is particularly relevant in the context of legal education. We therefore draw on this classic book to discuss, in the present volume, the consideration of research into legal education as lifetime learning, as creating meaning, as transformative and as developing world-changing thinking within the legal context. The volume offers research into classroom experiences and theoretical and historical interrogations of what it means to teach law subversively. Primarily aimed at legal educators and doctoral students in law planning careers as academics, its insights speak directly to tensions in higher education more broadly.

Legal Education as a Subversive Activity

Alex Steel

In the last few decades university teaching has been recognised as an activity which can be studied and improved through educational scholarship. In some disciplines this is now well established. It remains emergent in legal education. The field is rich with questions to be answered, issues to be raised. This book provides the first overall review of legal education scholarship. The chapters outline the history of legal education research and provide a detailed analysis of the trends in areas of publication. Beyond this, the book suggests a typology for further conceptualising the field and a series of suggested paths for future research. The book originated from the 2017 UNSW conference "Research in Legal Education: State of the Art?" It features internationally respected authors who bring their perspectives on how legal education – as a field of research – should be conceptualised. The collection is arranged into three themes. First, a historical view is taken of the emergence of legal education scholarship and its roots that predate modern educational theory. Secondly, the book provides overviews of the extant field of publications, highlighting areas of interest and neglect, and delineating the trends in current publication. Thirdly, the book provides a set of suggested typologies for describing legal education research and a series of essays for future directions which both critique current approaches and provide inspiration for future directions. The State of Legal Education Research represents an authoritative introduction to the field, a set of conceptual tools with which to describe it, and inspiration for researchers to expand and grow research into legal education.

Then, Now and Tomorrow

Imperatives for Legal Education Research

Marina Nehme

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